How to Optimize Your Landing Pages for SEO-Driven Conversions

Welcome to our second guest post from the marketing team at Wordstream. Wordstream is a Boston-based Internet marketing software company that provides advanced SEO tools and pay-per-click software for search marketing efforts. Their software rocks & can dramatically boost the relevancy of your PPC & SEO keywords! 

How to Optimize Your Landing Pages for SEO-Driven Conversions

When properly designed, landing pages or pages that appear when a customer clicks on an ad or a search engine result, can help companies maximize conversions. That’s because landing pages that target specific keywords help potential customers find the product or service they are most interested in without too much digging around.

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) for landing pages is often associated with pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, but it’s also important to apply CRO principles to SEO landing pages. (See Scott Brinker’s recent article on the relationship between SEO and CRO.)

If you are not involved with PPC, or want another avenue for exposure, you should consider optimizing your landing pages for SEO-driven conversions.

Here are eight tips for creating conversion-friendly landing pages for SEO:

1. Make sure each landing page has a targeted focus.

For example, if your company sells gold-plated ballpoint pens, silver-plated ballpoint pens, oil-based felt tip pens, and water-based felt tip pens, don’t include all of these pens on one landing page. If people are looking for pens online, chances are they have a certain type of pen in mind. If you list all the pens you sell on a single landing page, it probably won’t attain a high organic ranking for more targeted keyword searches. You can’t bid for an SEO keyword, so strong rankings are all about relevance.

2. Make sure your landing pages are rich with keywords.

This is also crucial for ranking high in natural search engine results. When your keywords appear in key fields like the page’s headline, subheads, and main content, it’s more likely that the landing page will show up when those keywords are searched. You can also put keywords in picture captions, calls to action, and meta tags. Of course, it’s important not to overstuff your page with keywords, as the repetition could annoy readers and appear spammy, undermining your SEO efforts.

3. Make your landing pages as easy to read as possible.

Including lots of content on the page is a great way to capture more traffic for long-tail keywords—but if your landing pages are cluttered and not easily skimmable, readers will quickly lose interest, and that will likely reduce your chance of a sale or other conversion. To keep your landing pages clean and readable, shorten lengthy paragraphs, make use of subheads and bullet points, add images to break up text, and delete unnecessary content. When designing a form for your landing page, make sure it isn’t so long as to steer people away.

4. Build your company’s credibility on your landing pages.

Because your ultimate goal is conversions, you need to prove to Web visitors that your offers are worth their while. One way to achieve that is by adding testimonials to your website. Make sure the testimonials relate to the specific product or service being promoted. Also, be aware that your website design has a big effect on how visitors perceive your company. Clean, user-friendly, professional design lends credibility and is also good for SEO, as well-structured sites are easier to crawl and tend to be more deeply indexed.

5. Use an engaging tone for your landing page content.

You may have an excellent layout for your site’s landing pages, but if your tone is impersonal, wordy or overly aggressive, you will fail at conversions. Try to focus on the potential customer. Think about what they may be seeking on your landing page and answer their potential questions as concisely as possible. Look at your organic keyword analytics to get insight into what visitors are looking for, and use that language on the page to better speak to their needs. While you want your readers to convert, overly forceful language will turn them off. 

6. Make sure your landing pages have a clear call to action.

There is a difference between harassing readers and persuading them. After explaining your product or service in a clear and convincing manner, tell them what they should do next (and don’t give them too many options). Your call to action may be “Register for a 30-day trial” or “Save 50% by ordering now.” This should appear above the fold. Emphasize the call to action by putting it in bold text or otherwise making it visually grabbing. Also, consider including your call to action in the meta description, as it may appear in search results and increase click-through rates.

7. If you update your site’s content frequently, you may want to include RSS feeds on your landing page.

Search engines respond well to pages with fresh content. They tend to be crawled more frequently and ranked higher. You can keep your landing pages fresh by including feeds from your company blog or forums on the pages’ periphery. Make sure, however, the links are designed in a way that doesn’t distract from the landing pages’ main content. You can also include navigational links to other pages on your site, especially if they are landing pages devoted to similar products or services.

8. Test different landing page variations and incorporate techniques that drive more conversions.

Test variations on one or more page elements such as headline, layout, introductory paragraph, form and button design and so on. Then track conversions resulting from organic search engine traffic. Implement the elements that result in the most conversions (small details can often make a big difference). It’s a good idea not to test too many elements at once, however; this can make interpreting results difficult.

Thanks to Christine Laubenstein, a marketing copywriter at Wordstream, for this great post!

Comments

[Jami Broom]

Nice - I'd like to add to #2 that placing keywords in the title tags of your landing page can also have a profound impact, especially since they show up as descriptions in the SERPs.

On the flip side, if you want to learn about why the ad copy, keywords, and ad groups of PPC campaigns should all be tailored and targeted to the content on the landing page, I wrote a blog post earlier today - http://www.clicksinternetmarketing.com/2010/03/number-keywords-adgroup/

[Chris Goward]

Some solid SEO tips here, Christine. Thanks. Scott's article also makes a good case for why SEO and CRO are different disciplines. I heartily agree with him!

There's also an article on the WiderFunnel blog called "How to Combine Conversion Optimization with SEO": http://bit.ly/CRO-SEO

It discusses a little more about how testing improves SEO results as well as conversion rates.